For some, happily ever after means living apart
The first question people asked when I moved out of my boyfriend’s house last summer was: “Are you breaking up?”
It’s not an unreasonable question. After all, moving in with a significant other usually signifies that a relationship is getting more serious. It often serves as a steppingstone between dating and marriage. To some, my moving out might’ve looked like we were becoming less invested in our relationship, or that it had ended.
But we weren’t splitting. I left because I missed living alone.
I am a writer and a musician, which means I spend a lot of time holed up by myself. I am also easily distracted, and I despise other people’s clutter. I have self-discipline but not enough. For example, if I laze around in bed too long, a risk that multiplies with company, I become anxious and irritable.
I’m far from the only one. About one-third of U.S. adults who aren’t married or living together are in live-apart together relationships like mine. Living apart but still being together allows for quality time over quantity of it. Sexual desire heightened by absence. It eliminates domestic disputes over, say, who takes out the trash.
There are also things I like about living with a partner. I enjoy the stability of knowing I’ll come home to them or them to me, and the intimacy of seeing each other in our rawest moments. There’s a sense of not just living together but creating a home together.
The first time I lived with my current boyfriend was after I accepted a job 300 miles away. We wanted to be together as much as possible before making the transition. So I moved out of the house I rented with 10 other millennials and into his, where we shared his room for three months. It was a particularly cold winter, but I remember it for its warmth. We worked on our respective creative projects in the dim red glow of the space heater; we cooked up frozen pizzas for dinner; we burrowed under blankets to watch “The X-Files.”
When it came time for my big move, he drove me and everything I owned eight hours through a rainstorm to begin my dream job in my dream city. When he prepared to drive back to Boston, I ugly cried trying to say it’s not goodbye, it’s see you later. “It’s an adventure,” he assured me.
We visited each other monthly for nearly a year. Then I quit my job to go back to school. If there was any consolation in abandoning the life I’d built in Philadelphia, it was that school brought me back to Boston. And back to my boyfriend’s new house, specifically. Initially, we basked in the proximity. Then came another cold winter, this time confined to tighter quarters.
Despite the ample time we spent apart, feeding our own interests and cultivating separate friendships, at home our lives blurred together. His hangout space doubled as my music studio as well as his art storage and work space. In the middle of this was the bed where we slept and on which I began my freelance writing career. It was merely circumstantial. It was also inescapable.
When sharing a room, your schedule and your space always account for someone else. There is beauty in the accommodations we make for people we love. But I knew that, no matter how busy I was I would make time for him. Lesser priorities were prone to slipping. Not him, though. And that’s when I realized we didn’t need to live together to be close. We could do that without sharing space.
It’s been almost a year since I moved out of my boyfriend’s house. I have my own bedroom and a studio down the hall.
While I sometimes miss our joint lifestyle and the rituals we shared, I don’t regret my choice. If anything, the physical distance has brought us closer.
Will I always want things to be this way? Who knows.
Whatever we decide, we’ve proven to be durable. For us, commitment doesn’t necessarily look like cohabitation.